Today to the day a hundred fifty years ago Colonel Edwin Laurentine Drake (Edwin Draka) finished drilling the first commercial oil well. Actually oil was found the next day only, when Drake’s driller, Billy Smith, looked into the hole in preparation for another day’s work and was surprised to see crude oil rising up .

Although Drake found the oil, the wealth wouldn’t follow for him due to some bad moves in establishing a business and he ended up empoverished. However, some have made some better profits over the past fifteen decades with pumping and trading and so we have managed to liberate a good portion of the confined carbon, sulfurs and nitrogen into our environment in the form of gases from fuels for transportation (70%), as industrial products such as lubricants and plastics (24%), as wastes and spills and burning oil wells (sorry, nobody evaluated this bit statistically) , and we have sealed the roads with tar and our skins with petroleum jelly (5%).

By the way, the first city to have its streets paved with tar was Baghdad in the 8th century AD…(no I won’t comment something distasteful here).

The consumption of oil has increased quite a bit since the first anniversary: Drake’s well produced 25 barrels (4 m3) a day – approximately the per capita per year consumption of today’s America (means: just 365 Americans could have lived then the same way they live today). Nowadays the oil output has reached roughly 71 Mio barrels per day (it was peaking at 74,8 million barrels/day in July 2008). That is 25915000000 barrels per year, or 4120485000000 litres per year. That makes for everyone on this planet (babys included) 608 litres or 3.82 barrels of crude oil per year! Hurrey!

In 2006 the Indians have been estimated to have a 0.8 barrels per capita per year consumption. But with a growth rate of the passenger vehicles segment of over 12 % between april 2007 and march 2008 (and this rate for sure will increase with increasing buying power of the middle class), the consumption in India (and of course in many other emerging markets like China, Brazil, Russia, Eastern Europe, African Countries and other fast developing countries in Asia like Cambodia and Vietnam…) will definitely call for much larger production quantities.

All the easy oil and gas in the world has pretty much been found. Now comes the harder work in finding and producing oil from more challenging environments and work areas.

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— William J. Cummings, Exxon-Mobil company spokesman, December 2005

Well never believe anything: neither believe there won’t be oil in short, nor believe the press reports about new huge discoveries. As they say in Texas: “money talks – bullshit walks”. Even mixing petrol with bio ethanol and diesel with bio diesel won’t make a good solution to the problem (well, yes maybe it will for the birthday child, but certainly not for the rest of the party) as it just speeds up the destruction of our environment.

Hold on – I wanted to stay positive in this article – so here we go: Let’s use water for the purpose! It won’t go waste – just put it in the tank, convert it into hydrogen on board and have it collected at the tail pipe in it’s original form. Unbelievable? In the mid 1930s Charles Garret has shown this principle to work with a simple electrolytic carburettor. Then there was Daniel Dingel who claims to have it working (but still waits for a customer to buy it at the desired price) and then not to forgett the legendary Stanley Meyer, who accidentially died from a bad stomach in a restaurant’s parking lot.

The Japanese venture Genepax recently came out with a similar solution for a water powered car.

It may be up to the consumers now to express their wish to buy this simple and ecofriendly technology. No more delays please, no more complex and expensive fuel cells with decentralised hydrogen production for further energy domination, no more excuses and no more deception. We just want to drive a clean vehicle and don’t even bother whether it is driven by airpressure as announced by TATA for late 2008 (hey, what happened..?) or by water or by the shit of female cows… Just not the male stuff anymore please!

When Nikola Tesla came to America to work for Thomas Edison, history took a strange turn. Tesla had some novel ideas about the use of alternating current in his mind, that he wanted to express and realize, but Edison had invested a great deal of his time and money into his own inventions based of DC current, that he wanted to see promoted and implemented. After some disputes this relationship turned sour. As a consequence the two great men became great adversaries and Tesla took off to develop his own AC system. Edison, in an attempt to win over the public interest started some campaign in which he publicly electrocuted innocent animals to demonstrate the dangers of AC power, but Tesla finally defeated Edison with the support of George Westinghouse, when he electrified and lit the 1893 Chicago World Fair. This was a big success which let to the realisation of the Niagara Falls hydroelectric power project and the rest is history: his alternating current technology became the world standard for energy generation and distribution.

But to be fair, I think we have to credit both men with equal respect: Edison gave us the electric light while Tesla gave us the AC power that enables distribution of Energy over large distance (besides many other remarkable contributions from both men). Tesla and Edison, both, are in fact – from an objective point of view – complementary to each other, despite their seemingly contrary stands. After all, in retrospect it has become a needless dispute who was right and who was wrong or whose technology is superior.

What would have happened, if these two contemporaries had become friends during their lifetime and concentrated on their common interests and shared their findings and cooperated in their efforts, rather than resorting to proud righteousness and petty ego fights? But then… both were humans and ego gratification is believed to be a prime human motivator – everybody craves for recognition and superiority. Unfortunately when it comes to business this craving can easily turn into an ugly addiction for greed, power, domination. That’s where we find ourselves today as far as energy standards are concerned.

We pollute, we fight, we kill thereby destroying our very life foundation for energy dominance, and inspite of growing global awareness and imminent dire consequences of our outdated attitude, we seems to make very meagre progress in quitting such self destructive tendencies. Somehow it appears we deliberately ignore the urgency as well as the fact that we all populate one and the same planet, breathe the same air and before all – that we write century XXIst…

In my opinion it’d be about time to (re-)discover mutualities and the creative aspects of our presence on this globe and make it a fun game to solve the problems of our own making. Finally it is about our future as a race and how we want to spend the time here together. In regard to the Energy question it may help to focus on innovation over conservation, renewable sources over controllable sources, decentralised systems over centralised ones – and until the deployment of fresh and better solutions we can resort to a bit of energy/fuel efficiency by banning Edisons warm glowing bulbs for cold white Tesla light. But really, I believe there is no need for dictated modesty as there is plenty of Energy available in a variety of forms that can be harnessed (a much nicer term than “exploited” anyway, isn’t it?) and who knows, maybe we just have to dig a bit in some dusty drawers to find some existing and readily available technologies and solutions. I know, this might not sound like a great idea to everyone due to reasons of the above mentioned prime human motivator…but hey – haven’t we all clearly hoped and voted for CHANGE?

Last night I was spending quite some time figuring out how to get qtranslate translate the Dates of posts and the current date on the upper right of my purple template correctly. As you can see, I somehow managed, but I have to confess that I was reaching through trial and error and finally applying some methods which may make somebody more PHP savvy than me raise his/her eyebrows: I have actually hardcoded the words “Posted by” and “on” into the german analogs “Gepostet durch” and “am” into the template files by using an if/else statement with ‘qtrans_getLanguage()’ function. A similar statement I used to get the actual date and the slogan in the header translated. I realized, that many people seem to experience some difficulties with date/time in qtranslate and I just want to share my experiences here as it might be useful to somebody else experiencing the same dfficulties.

I this template the posting dates are coded as the_date() and the actual date is called by date().

the_date() function in the posts translates dates without difficulties with my chosen settings, but I could not get qtranslate to translate date() in the header section and as I already mentioned, my knowledge of PHP is quite limited, so I could – inspite of all trials – not getting anything to work apart from using strftime() for the actual date.

My settings in qtranslate are as follows:

in Settings/Language/Avanced Settings/Date Time Conversion I selected “use emulated date function” and I edited the Language file like this: For German I enter ‘l, j. F, Y’ (without quotes) into the date field (time field can remain unchanged in my case, as I don’t use time indication). For English I enter ‘l, F jS, Y’ (without quotes – and again I don’t bother about time).

Final remark: above said – it all applies with my theme and my two languages English and German and I am in no way able to go beyond that in my explanations: I am sorry I just don’t have the time, FREE ENERGY or the in-depth knowledge to answer questions any better in the comments. However you can ask them anyway, some genius might come across to answer them for me…

I feel it like Edison, when he failed a thousand times to create his light bulp and finally had a bright result – though I preferred I could do like Nikola Tesla who just figured it all out in his mind and every of his creations, when translated to the material plane, just worked on the first attempt.

This is my first post in this newly dressed cleanteam.ch blog. I have had it idle for quite some while after I had taken down all the posts. I just could not keep up with writing and then I was also tired of seeing my outdated posts which would not interest anybody anymore anyway (anyone?). Well, not a very clever strategy from SEO point of view, but then – I am not writing for SEs but for people.

I am still using the same wordpress theme: bible scholar by eGrace Creative – thanks Brandon Cox, – have given it a little face lift for my purpose – how do you like it? I have also updated to the latest wordpress release and implemented bilingual posting with qtranslate which I find very useful, simple to handle and very reliable – thanks Qian Qin.

Of course, there is some work left with the appearance of the blog, but I just wanted to quickly re-initiate it with this post, so remaining work will follow as time and ENERGY allows.

Ah yes, as everything – and I mean EVERYTHING – in this Universe is composed of energy, I wanted to make this my topic…clever nuh, so I am not limited into a narrow niche which might be getting boring soon 😉

I will be writing more soon about my motivation to post on this topic (yes there is a more specific reason than the one stated above) but today I am just lacking the POWER to do so. So please stay tuned – I will try to get back into the habit of regular postings…